Do you ever get really irritated by certain things? Just little seemingly trivial actions or habits that most people probably don't think twice about, but which set your teeth on edge and make you want to scream under your breath? I've realised lately that a lot of things annoy me no end so I thought I'd do a post about my pet peeves in the hope that writing them out will cure me, or at least help me to rise above it slightly.

People who use their phones while watching a movie. Literally this is the most annoying thing ever. I'm not even talking about using your phone in the cinema (which is extremely distracting), I just mean when you're watching something with friends or family at home and people start texting or scrolling through Facebook in the middle of watching the thing. I don't have a problem with just quickly checking your emails or Instagram notifications or whatever, it's more when people start texting or messaging someone or doing anything else that makes it clear they aren't paying attention that bugs me. When I watch a film (even one I've seen before) I like to be 100% engrossed in it and comment on things to the people I'm watching it with, so I find it really irritating when the other people clearly aren't concentrating on the plotline because they're so distracted by their phones. Argh even just thinking about this is making me angry!

When people describe everything as cute. Kittens are cute. Puppies are cute. Babies are (mostly) cute. But you know what isn't cute? That top you bought or those jeans or that pair of ballet flats. Argh when will it end?? It annoys me so much when people (mostly YouTubers, but some people irl are guilty of this too) refer to literally EVERYTHING as cute or adorable when in reality it's just a really nice top or whatever - please enlarge your vocabulary and stop using an adjective intended to describe something sweet, youthful, pretty, dainty or quaint to describe a skirt.

When Americans talk about 'Europe'. As in 'I'm going to Europe on vacation this summer' or 'When I was in Europe...'. Unless you're doing a full-blown tour of the entire continent, do you mean France or Romania? Dorset or the Costa Blanca? Berlin or Athens? I hate to break it to you but Europe is not a country, it is in fact a continent containing many countries, a lot of which have their own cultures and identities and are generally extremely different from one another. But no, Americans have this habit of lumping them together and referring to them collectively - please, be more specific. I'm aware that we 'Europeans' tend to do this too when we talk about 'America', but assuming we mean it as an abbreviated form of 'the United States of America' I don't think that's nearly as bad, given that technically it is all one country with one language and culture.

The huge fuss that people make over Halloween. Ok, so according to the origins of the day (a time to remember the departed and traditionally when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest) Halloween is supposed to be scary, haunting and generally fear-inducing. Accordingly, for me 'dressing up' has always involved some sort of scary outfit, like a witch or a ghost or a vampire, and (when I was little) being dared to do things like run around the shed at the bottom of the garden in the middle of the night. But lots of people seem to interpret Halloween as 'dress up as anything you like' which of course you can, no one's stopping you, but in my opinion it loses the essence and the meaning behind the celebration. Dressing up as any old random thing is what you do on Carnival or an equivalent celebration, not on Halloween!

When people deny climate change. Alright so this went from petty to serious real quick and possibly this doesn't count as a 'peeve' but it really really makes me angry when people try to deny that climate change is a thing. I'm currently doing an online course with the Open University that's mostly about inequality (economic, social, gender etc.) but in the comments on one of the stages some idiot had written a whole comment about how he didn't believe in 'global warming' because his mother lives in Russia and says it's actually getting colder there *facepalm*. Which of course I responded too with a paragraph about how climate change is actually affecting the world because I'm a geography student and we live and breathe this stuff.

Unnecessary commenters. This is quite a specific one but it's linked to my last peeve so bear with. The course I'm doing is made up of various steps which you have to complete before you can move onto the next one and at the bottom of each step is a comments section. Now sometimes the step is meant to be a discussion or debate so the whole point is to post in the comments, but there are an awful lot of people who seem to feel the need to post the most banal and unnecessary things on every single step. What, I ask you, is the point of posting 'I found this interesting' or 'very good article' every single time? You don't get points for commenting and no one cares if you found it good or interesting, you're clogging up the comments section and making it more difficult to find out if people have in fact written anything of value. I'm not saying people don't have the right to comment because clearly they do; if you do find something interesting, fair enough, but why not explain why and elaborate a bit more rather than just posting the same thing as a hundred other commenters?! Like I said this is quite a specific case because here there is no value to pointless comments, whereas on other platforms such as YouTube clearly any kind of positive comment is going to encourage the creator and make their efforts worthwhile.

Whoops, this turned into a mini rant post, sorry! Turns out I have a lot of things I needed to get off my chest, but hopefully now they're out there in the ether I can move on. Do you have any pet peeves?

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